


Parental Polygons

by singalellaby



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Character Death Fix, Doctors drinking far too much, F/F, F/M, Fix it Ficathon, Future Fic, Unconventional familial geometry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-19
Updated: 2013-02-19
Packaged: 2017-11-29 19:15:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/690490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singalellaby/pseuds/singalellaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So Mark can keep his status as the good cop and his stupid handsome face with its stupid look of pity and understanding. Lexie and Arizona have wine and, clearly, that makes everything better.</p>
<p>Written for the prompt: Mark/Lexie + Arizona/Callie, parenting gets harder as Sophia gets older.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Parental Polygons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hariboo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hariboo/gifts).



> Written for the Fix It comment fication over on LJ. I can't believe it's taken me eight seasons to actually write something for this fandom.

"No, but really. That she gets Mark's sex drive. That. _That_."

Lexie gurgles into her wine and nearly gets chardonnay up her nose. She splutters a little at the sharpness and has to slap a hand down on the kitchen island. "How do you know she already hasn't? The average age for onset of puberty in girls has dropped five-point-three years since 1920, and it's not as if _Callie_ wasn't an early bloomer, so based on what she's likely to have inherited from--." She cuts off the instinctive urge to rattle off statistics, a tendency only amplified one and three quarters of a bottle of wine down, when she sees the horrified look on Arizona's face and rapidly backtracks. "Well, uh, at least she can't accidentally get anyone pregnant. And we're all doctors - we'll give her all the condoms she wants!" It's meant to have been a reassuring comment. Given the exact nature of Sofia's creation, its intended impact is perhaps...lessened. 

Arizona's now looking as if some visiting attending has patted her ass and called her 'nurse' so Lexie lunges forwards and upends the bottle over her glass as if that will fix the damage her motor mouth is doing. "My turn? My turn. Uhhh." Arizona drinks with the blind determination of one attempting to cleanse an image from the mind. With alcohol. Lots of alcohol. But at least it gives Lexie time to think because even her brain is sluggish from a combination of gloomy resignation and grape-tasting ethanol. "She wants to go into acting when she grows up?"

"Oh, mmm, good one," Arizona says after swallowing and then looks in pained bemusement as she tips the empty bottle upside down. "The wine is gone? Why is the--oh." She looks much happier when Lexie wordlessly pulls another bottle from the wine rack conveniently built into the island by her legs. Best anniversary present that he'd ever given her. Other than that selective amygdalohippocampectomy for their very first. That had been exciting. 

Reassured by the continued existence of white wine in their world, Arizona's doing her drunk-and-thoughtful face. What's weird is that Sofia makes that exact face over Math homework, so it's clearly a learned behaviour rather than a genetically inherited one. "God, here's one." Arizona holds up her wine glass like an exclamation point and, to her credit, she only spills a little. Lexie _did_ fill it up very full after all. "She and Zola decide to form an after school club about how their unconventional family demographics have ruined their lives forever." She narrows her eyes for dramatic significance and hisses "And they get _t-shirts._ "

Lexie doesn't know whether to laugh or cry, but she's always been an inappropriately happy drunk and goes for the former. Hysterically. After a while Arizona joins in and that's how Mark finds them, clutching their stomachs and their wine glasses with equal fervour, cackling like two out of the three witches from Macbeth. Lexie thinks that they must look mad if _Mark_ is staring at them with wary confusion.

"Ladies," he says cautiously. "This looks like a lot of fun to be having on a school night."

"No," Arizona corrects him, shaking her head until her pigtails fly this way and that (and Lexie has no idea how she manages it, looking good and right in pigtails at her age). "No no no. We're not having _fun_. We're playing a _drinking game._ "

"Drinking game," Lexie repeats seriously because she's got Arizona's back tonight, even against her husband.

"A drinking game where you have to come up with the worst possible parenting problems Sofia's going to throw at us."

"The worst ones," Lexie agrees.

"Because we needed to be reminded that tonight is, really, not that bad in the grand scheme of things and that there's much worse still left to come." Arizona manages to look defiant and desperate and drunk all at once as she takes a pointed sip of her drink. "So, wine."

"Wiiiiiiiiine."

Lexie has at some point commandeered the entire bottle and is hugging it to her chest like a pillow. Or a central line. Or, more often than not, Mark's face. The same face that is, right now, torn between caution and sympathy. Because _he's_ fine, he's related to Sofia by blood. Sofia didn't scream at _him_ tonight that he was stopping her real parents from being a proper couple just by existing. No, she saved that for Lexie and Arizona and that's why they are sitting (read: hiding) in hers and Mark's apartment while Sofia insisted on being put to bed by her biological parents. So Mark can keep his status as the good cop and his stupid handsome face with its stupid look of pity and understanding. Lexie and Arizona have _wine_ and, clearly, that makes everything better.

"Oh dear." Callie's here now and she and Arizona are having one of their silent conversations, the ones made out of significant looks and subtly arched eyebrows. Well, normally they're subtle. Arizona's currently look as if they're doing jumping jacks. Whatever they convey with their weird lesbian telepathy, Callie sighs and gets two more wine glasses down. "Sofia's asleep. Lexie, pour." Lexie thinks about being mulish and refusing, since this wine was originally reserved for Non-Blood Parents Feeling Sorry For Themselves. "Lexie. _Pour_." And that's Callie's 'you're all pussies, _fine_ , I'll be the hard ass parent' voice and wine is flowing in a straw-coloured stream before Lexie remembers she's not actually an intern anymore. Or a resident for that matter. 

While she's puzzling out that particular Pavlovian reaction, Mark wraps an arm around her waist and rests his chin on top of her head. "So," he says with deliberate cheer in that manner he reserves for when he's determined to prove they're a happy if somewhat eclectically modern family, "did you come up with a winner?" 

Reassured in spite of drunken self-pity by the familiar warmth of him, Lexie nods. "Arizona thinks she's going to grow up to be a man-whore like you," she says absently and then grins with surprised satisfaction when Callie spits chardonnay everywhere. She'll take her little victories where she can. 

Except Mark has no sense of humour whatsoever where Sofia and sex are concerned. He'll make dirty jokes about everyone and their mother (especially their mothers, actually) but he's a humour black hole when it comes to Sofia and the looming disaster known as sexual maturity that lurks in all of their futures. "I reformed," he says defensively, but that's so far in all of their pasts now that he doesn't rise to the bait too much. Neither does he move away from her and she tucks his forearm under her chin, sacrificing one hand's hold on her wineglass to a rub a thumb over the strong nub of his wrist. 

Opposite them, across the island, Callie is rubbing sympathetic circles on Arizona's back while her wife's forehead communes with the cold marble. "I _am_ sorry, sweetheart," she says. "I really am. But we all knew this was coming at some point or another. We all remember the Zola incident of 2019." Which had been when Zola had suddenly made the mental leap to comprehend the potential implications of her being adopted and the younger Grey-Shepherd _not_ being so. Lexie's drunk enough to admit that if her kid brother potentially had access to the awesome Shepherd hair genes and she didn't, she'd have had a meltdown and demanded to move in with Bailey as well. 

Arizona makes a muffled noise into the island top that Callie seems to accurately translate as 'knowing it was coming doesn't make it any easier to hear' (again, lesbian telepathy, it's almost enough to make Lexie look consideringly at the butch new oncology fellow if closing her eyes and imagining stubble would mean gaining superpowers) and makes soothing noises. Sympathy is all very well, but it's actually the tender way she angles the wine bottle so that Arizona can drink from it without removing her head from the countertop that is one of the signs of a happy marriage. "We'll have a family meeting tomorrow," she promises. "We'll order in her favourite pizza and we'll treat her like an adult and we'll explain to her that it doesn't matter whose sperm and whose egg it was that made her, it's _love_ that raised her." 

"We are _not_ talking to Sofia about my sperm!" Mark's doing his horrified and protective father schtick again and then flinches just a little when all three of his women-folk glare at him. They do it in perfect synchronicity as well, so maybe Lexie is picking up on the lesbian telepathy, just a little. Maybe lesbian telepathy is osmotic. Maybe lesbian telepathy is _contagious_. 

...Maybe lesbian telepathy isn't actually the point. Maybe it's that Lexie never signed up for kids so early in her life and ended up with one anyway. Maybe's it's that she came to love said kid _so damn much_ and was surprised by how invested she was in being Sofia's father's wife. Maybe it's because she hadn't even put that much importance on possessing the label of 'parent' right up until Sofia told her she didn't deserve it. Lexie sighs and looks dejected. She can feel Mark doing the same because he more than any of them is unhappy when Sofia is unhappy. And Arizona looks as if she's just been told that her heelies are finally, finally banned from the hospital. 

Callie looks at all of them and then rolls her eyes so hard that it has to be painful. "And if that doesn't work then we'll let Meredith talk to her about _her_ parental issues, and I guarantee she'll be begging you two to put her to bed." 

Lexie considers being insulted by what that implies about both her sister and her father. Just for a minute. Then she calculates the statistical probability of that actually being a pretty good idea and... 

Cautiously, Arizona lifts her head. "If we have a plan, does that mean we have to stop drinking?" she asks, sounding plaintive. 

Mark scoffs and makes a 'gimme' gesture towards the wine glass meant for him. "If we have a plan, that means we can drink guilt free." 

Lexie knows that the issue has hardly being fixed and the part of her that Cristina _still_ calls Lexiepedia will likely be going over and over Sofia's exact words in excruciating detail for the next period of wakefulness (which actually may not be for that much longer, Mark buys _good_ wine) but...alcohol. Her husband's warmth against her back. The four of them banded together to face the parenting issues that had been _precisely_ why Lexie had run as far away from Mark and Callie and their unexpected foetus in the first place. And this is what ten years does to a person. This is what makes the difference between not willing to fight for this shared future of theirs and having that be the thing that drives her the most. So she tentatively lets something that feels like wine-soaked relief filter into her head and then, when Mark murmurs "And on the bright side, Sofia's sleeping at their place tonight" into her ear before nipping it, she yelps delightedly and decides to have her midlife 'not a parent' crisis tomorrow. 


End file.
